Okay, so you know how I got to meet Kelly Ripa this summer? Well, I’m going to meet her again next week at a fashion event for bloggers. (Yeah, me and fashion…I promise to leave my cleats at home.)
Anyhow, it’s all in honor of National Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, which is this month, starting with tomorrow’s National Teal Day. Here’s the official info on that:
National Teal Day and The Ovarian Cancer National Alliance will lead the efforts of thousands of Americans wearing teal to increase awareness about the deadly disease. Teal is the ovarian cancer community’s color and serves as a reminder that ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all the cancers of the reproductive system and a leading cause of cancer death among women. For more information, visit ovariancancer.org.
You can still build a virtual banana split over at Kelly Confidential, too. For every split you make, Electrolux will donate a dollar to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.
Meanwhile, loads of people have had fun watching the video my kids and I made about meeting Kelly Ripa, who works hard to raise awareness and money for ovarian cancer research. I will say hi to her for you when I see her (again).
Maybe I shouldn’t have been the person gathering the papers entitled “End of Life.” Or maybe I was the perfect person for it. It’s hard to say.
All I know for sure is that I didn’t want my kids to see them, even though they knew well that our neighbor had died yesterday morning at the way-too-young age of 54.
It’s why we were all at his house – the four of us and our neighbor Grace – cleaning. We wanted to help his family get the house ready for all the visitors who will be stopping by the next few days.
Of the five of us, I’m the only one who has actually come close to the end of life — two months from it, according to my oncologist. So while Grace cleaned the kitchen, my husband, Pete, did the heavy lifting and my boys dusted the bookshelves, I took the plastic container that his wife had told me I’d find in the garage, and started filling it with medical things: alcohol swabs, a box of latex gloves, medical files from Sloan-Kettering, the signed copy of “The Council of Dads” I had given him, his broken laptop with a LiveStrong sticker affixed to its cover. By the time we finished cleaning, the box was full of proof of his final days and his unfair fight with cancer. I noticed that his wife put it away quickly. Maybe she, too, didn’t want her kids to see it.
We gathered up our cleaning supplies and headed to my mini-van just as the rain started. When we got home, I fell asleep in the chair while the kids watched “Mythbusters.” At dinner, we prayed for our neighbors.
So perhaps I should be out smelling flowers today, but I’m not. I’m going on with life as usual. There’s my son frantically searching for the clean socks I’d left in his room last night. There’s the other one, picking out which European soccer jersey to wear to camp to irk his Welsh soccer coach, a Liverpool fan. Then there’s me driving the camp carpool, with a soccer cleat in my lap and a pen in my mouth, waiting for the next kid’s driveway where I could once again attempt to get the knot out of the cleat’s laces in time for camp drop-off.
But don’t think for a moment that I didn’t notice what was going on behind the scenes. The impossibly beautiful summer morning. The baby deer grazing on someone’s yard. The song on my car radio telling me “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”
My son, the artist, sitting quietly in the front seat, trying to ignore all the soccer talk. His “Thanks Mom” when I dropped him off for art class. The silence after they all had left my car and I drove home, alone, through the winding streets of my neighborhood.
This is where I — the one who has been so close to the end of life – am supposed to tell you to treat each day as though it’s your last. Except, if it were mylast, I certainly wouldn’t be tanking up my mini-van for the rest of the week’s carpools. Or putting another load of laundry in the washer. Or clicking “Like” on my friends’ Facebook photos of their weekends at the beach.
Rather, I suggest that you treat every day as though you’ve got a whole lot of them left, precisely because you don’t really know if you do. Go about the everyday, do the drop-offs, get out the knots. Clean the house. Go ahead and get through the stuff that fills your To-Do list, the stuff you’ll forget about once they’re crossed out. Slog, if you must, because that’s perfectly okay. In fact, it’s a luxury not all of us can afford.
Still, every now and then, don’t forget to turn up the radio and listen — really listen – to the lyrics. Notice the deer. Stand in the driveway a moment and breathe in the impossibly beautiful day.
Nap through “Mythbusters,” but say a prayer for someone who needs it.
Race out last minute to art class pick-up, but offer to cook for a sick neighbor.
Pile the laundry on top of the dryer, but stare out the window at the gorgeous red cardinal on the oak tree out front, thinking about your friend who died way too young.
Enjoy the luxury of the everyday. Dash through the supermarket. Reheat last night’s dinner. Whine a little. Live like you have a lot of life ahead, but don’t be entirely too sure of it. Just in case.
“Think Chris realizes his cowboy hat is on backwards?” I asked my friend Mary, who was sitting next to me on the (butt-numbing) bleachers at our kids’ elementary school yesterday afternoon.
“Nah,” she replied.
“I’m amazed it fits him,” I added. “He’s got a big head for a kid.”
“Whose hat is it?” she asked, and I told her it’s mine.
“And why do you have a cowboy hat?” she wondered. (more…)
I didn’t see Lily until she appeared suddenly next to my chair. She was blocking my view of the stage, where I’d just given a speech before 330 people, most of whom would be running the New Jersey Marathon on behalf of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training on Sunday morning.
I’d just cleared away a tear, caused by the entirely unexpected standing ovation — my first — after a speech to “my people,” survivors, and families and friends of survivors who, like me, had been touched (more like slapped) by a blood cancer. I was supposed to inspire them, but they inspired me, by choosing to run 13 or 26 miles to raise a total of about $700,000 dollars for the LLS. (As I said in my speech, I don’t run unless there’s a ball or a chance to slide tackle someone else with a ball. Go runners!) (more…)
The scented pencils come in root beer, bubble gum, watermelon and so much more. Individually, they smell like manufactured childhood, like a pack of bright colored gum or a handful of candies in clear wrappers. Together, they smell like a pillowcase full of Halloween loot left in the back of your car on a hot day.
We will no doubt wind up keeping this bucket of Smencils, minus the few that my son will sell for his fifth grade fundraiser, just like his brother did last year. The problem is that the target audience for a Smencil is decidedly under age 14, and yet the kids aren’t allowed to sell them on the school bus or at Boy Scouts meetings or other places where children congregate. He can’t very well bring them to soccer practice, anyhow, to sell to other fifth graders who have their own buckets of Smencils at home, and he’s not supposed to sell door-to-door. So the bucket sits on our kitchen counter, bringing back vague memories of getting sick at a birthday party in kindergarten every time I walk by it.
And that’s fine with me. In fact, it’s downright wonderful. (more…)
My hospital room view, only here it's from my car in traffic on the FDR Drive.
I made a deal with the Sun: You keep rising every morning from behind the smokestacks that hover over the buildings on Roosevelt Island, and I’ll fight another day.
And then every morning I’d wait, watching the waves on the East River, at first a deep, midnight blue, and then solid gray, and finally, brownish gray as the Sun kept its promise to me. I’d slide off my bed, careful not to yank out the tubes carrying the orange drugs into my arm, and roll my chemo pole into the bathroom.
The Sun was up, and so was I. As promised. But my end of the bargain was harder to keep. (more…)
By the time we decided to have our picture taken atop the ski mountain, my toes were near frozen — this, despite the toe warmers in my ski boots. That’s my excuse for why I started to slide backwards on my skis right when my brother, Scott, was about to snap a photo of my son, Chris, and me: (more…)
That’s what I wrote in my Facebook status this week when several friends suggested that I post the color of my bra to raise awareness for breast cancer. I did it in solidarity to my sisters — friends, family members and others — who’ve battled breast cancer. Also, to appease the breast cancer gods because, you see, I had radiation to my chest and I am, therefore, at a high risk for breast cancer. (more…)
Back then, I could keep up with him on the soccer field more easily.
He was 18, and I had no business being there. It was too much, too soon, and yet, I didn’t want to leave.
I was playing right defense on my brother Scott’s “over-the-hill” soccer team, guarding a kid who’d tagged along with his dad so he could get ready for his league match later that day. Apparently, dribbling around me – a middle-aged mother of two who was not quite a year in remission from an aggressive form of lymphoma – was this kid’s warm-up. For me though, just standing on the turf field in my soccer cleats so soon after completing six rounds of chemotherapy and five weeks of radiation was a comeback. Or it was supposed to be. (more…)
So while Grace cleaned the kitchen, my husband, Pete, did the heavy lifting and my boys dusted the bookshelves, I took the plastic container that his wife had told me I’d find in the garage, and started filling it with medical things: alcohol swabs, a box of latex gloves, medical files from Sloan-Kettering, the signed copy of “The Council of Dads” I had given him, his broken laptop with a LiveStrong sticker affixed to its cover. By the time we finished cleaning, the box was full of proof of his final days and his unfair fight with cancer. I noticed that his wife put it away quickly. Maybe she, too, didn’t want her kids to see it.
